SANTA ANA : Remorseful Inmate Sends Doctor a Note

Dr. John Lehman received a surprise in his mailbox this week: a letter of apology from a bank robbery suspect.

The letter, written from the Federal Detention Center in Los Angeles by 37-year-old Walter Lewis, began:

“Doc, I’m writing you this letter to say that I apologize. . . . I’ve been sitting here thinking about you and I feel real BAD. . . . Sometimes in life people don’t think, and I didn’t think.”

Lewis, who was being chased by police, burst in Lehman’s fourth-floor office on April 27, asking for a place to hide. The Compton resident, who was unarmed, was suspected of robbing a Wells Fargo Bank in Orange earlier that morning.

Police had followed Lewis and an accomplice, 29-year-old Maurice Ronae Bowman, from Orange to the medical center complex in the 1500 block of 17th Street. Lewis jumped out of the car and ran into the building; Bowman was arrested in the parking lot.

For more than an hour, as police conducted a floor-by-floor search of the five-story building, a nervous Lewis sat in an examining room with Lehman, 75. He told the veteran dermatologist and the physician’s 39-year-old receptionist daughter, Jackie Lehman, that he had shot a friend during a dispute over money and was hiding from police.

Of those anxious moments, Lewis wrote:

“When I was in your office, I almost started to cry. . . . My mother didn’t raise me this way and I just got myself into something that I must pay for.”

Before surrendering to police, Lewis gave the doctor an envelope filled with cash and begged Lehman to send it to his wife. The doctor later turned the cash over to police.

Lewis, who has not yet gone to trial, also wrote: “Let’s just look at it as something funny, like a storybook! Something that you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren one day. And I’ll be able to tell mine about the great man I met.”

For his part, Lehman said he was “unfazed” by the experience and said he has developed a soft spot in his heart for Lewis, who he said was unfailingly polite during their encounter.

Lehman said he didn’t feel threatened during the time Lewis was in his office, adding that he encouraged Lewis to turn himself in to police.

“I think I might send him a note,” said Lehman, who has been in practice for more than 40 years. “I hope he doesn’t get too bad a sentence and can get his life together again. He didn’t seem like your typical bank robber.”